#BAD11 Food for thought

I have an odd relationship with Food; I am rather fond of it but as one of those women perpetually trying to lose weight, I find it a bit of a curse too. Today I decided to write a piece for Blog Action Day, which meant I had to sit down and really think about Food and to be honest that doesn’t happen often. As a result, I am reminded that my relationship with Food is a massive privilege and my standpoint a hugely selfish one.

For example, I love a good dinner, but am put off by fancy restaurants, partly because I like to know who is cooking my Food, but mostly because I like it fresh and simple (I have never understood why people get so excited about French cuisine); my idea of heaven is a bowl of spaghetti tossed in fresh spinach and tomatoes (again fresh, not the tinned things) cooked in several cloves of garlic and topped with enough parmesan (fresh, of course) to cover the plate twice over. I am a vegetarian who has never eaten fish, partly because I could never get my head around eating something that lived in the sea in which I swam, but mostly because it smells disgusting; I haven’t eaten meat in well over a decade having only ever picked at it before, again because I couldn’t get my head around eating something that had once breathed the same air as me and frankly if it hadn’t been for sausages and living too long in Germany, meat would have been off the menu a lot earlier. I don’t really care whether you choose to eat meat in front of me or not, I’m not going to get all Morrissey about it, but I do tend to think that if you can’t kill it, you shouldn’t be eating it.

I’ve always maintained that with the exception of my aversion to eating flesh, I’m not a fussy eater. On reading the above however, I sound like a spoilt brat. And as far as Food is concerned, I am. There are plenty of people on this planet who would find my Food preferences abhorrent – not because of what I choose to eat, but for the simple fact that I am able to choose. I spent way too much time taking that privilege for granted.

I have spent a large portion of this weekend in the garden, preparing my tiny piece of green space for the autumn and coming winter months. Today it was about pulling up the last of the root vegetables and cutting back the last raspberry canes along with the shrubs that have now finally stopped flowering. Every time I’m in the garden I have a little robin that follows me about – the compost heap is a treasure trove of Food for him and while he was twittering away at me today I tried to negotiate a deal whereby he has access to all the worms in my compost heap today so long as he eats all of next year’s snails – we’ll see how that went next June. All very Disney I must say.

I live in a terrace house in East London and all the houses along my street have gardens; I get quite upset by people who don’t use theirs arguing that having a garden in London, albeit a small one, is indeed a privilege and not one that should be wasted. That being upset is more about green space though, it’s not about having space to grow Food. For certain people on this planet, having as much land as I do, fertile land at that, would feed their family all year round and some. I hadn’t really sat down and thought about that until today and I feel utterly ashamed.

I use my garden for a variety of things, from roses to beetroot, from lavender to tomatoes and all the herbs you can imagine. The thing is, if my beetroot fails, I can just pop up to the supermarket and buy some more. If Food I’ve grown goes off before I have had a chance to eat it, then it goes on the compost heap, that way I can feel all good about myself for not wasting anything. Growing vegetables for me is a bit of a hobby – the fact that it is a hobby and not a necessity makes it a huge luxury. The fact that my tomato crop this year has been a bit of a disappointment is not going to do any more than disappoint me, I can still feed myself.

Perhaps it’s time to put things into perspective; I am one of the luckiest people on this planet, I don’t have to think about Food that often, but maybe I will from now on.

It’s all in the stories

This weekend saw MIPJunior kick off the Mipcom week in Cannes and many of my former colleagues will either be trying to flog their latest cartoon creations for children or watching countless brightly coloured characters of various shapes and sizes whizz across their screens. This sounds like a dream occupation to some but believe me, when it’s hot and sunny (as it invariably is in Cannes) the last place you want to be is in the bunker looking at yet another purple dinosaur while you can only imagine the sound of the sea lapping the shore outside. So why the fuss? Well somewhere in the plethora of crash bang wallops will be a story for all to treasure, one that children everywhere will hold fond and remember for the rest of their lives and that’s what you’re looking for. But it will only be one – if that – because a really good story is as rare as a new and original style of music and for much the same reasons. Furthermore, children’s television has become as much about merchandise (and in some cases more) as it is good story-telling.

And I have to admit, this shift is one of the reasons I fell out of love with the business of animation: I am a great believer in good story-telling and all it does to feed a child’s imagination while nurturing its creativity and expanding its vocabulary and appreciation of language (do I need to go on?); but I am not a believer in pink sparkly things that do nothing but encourage worn-out stereotypes.

Now this post could go one of several ways. I could tell you a story or two of my own about my childhood relationship with books – the Puffin Club and sponsored reads, that strange time zone called Foyles where I discovered that days could disappear (a get-out clause I still use today) – just to demonstrate the concept of why it’s important to keep libraries open, especially for kids. It would not be too difficult to conjure up some blarney about the rebellious teenager who despite everything still found solace in a library full of musty old books. However, I would like to think that if you’re intelligent enough to be reading this, you’re intelligent enough to know why closing libraries is a ridiculous idea.

I could also ride the campaign to maintain a level of quality on children’s television because I do believe television should not be one long advertisement for brightly coloured plastic and can and indeed when it’s done well, is an educative tool. I would suggest if you want to know more about that, then visit my friends at Save Kids’ TV who say it much better than I ever could.

This post is neither of these things. I simply wanted to share a light bulb moment with you: while on the way home the other day, with my head buried in a novel as usual, this time The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, I came across the following:

“Human beings learn and absorb ideas and concepts through narrative, through stories, not through lessons or theoretical speeches”.

He was talking about fables and religious texts – and I’m not going to go into that whole different ball game – but it did get me thinking that this is actually true of life overall. The most effective campaigns, whatever they’re about, are effective because they tell a story. We the audience are then able to relate it back to our own lives and are therefore more likely to buy it (in all senses of the word).

And why was this a light bulb moment? Well it was a bit like finding the tagline to a concept I always knew had legs. I’ve always known that to sell something, I had to get a tagline – a sentence that told the story in summary (‘to boldly go where no man has gone before’ is probably the most famous). Whether you’re selling a film, a charity campaign, a social enterprise or even a religious cult, the concept is the same: you have to get that message right, you need a narrative and that has to speak to everyone in the same way the first line of a book has to make people want to read on. Maybe it’s just that we humans have more capacity to remember things, when we’re told a story, than we do when we’re lectured at; I guess before parchment the only way to remember things was through stories and as a result we’ve evolved to hold those for longer …

Which is where I shall end. Just remember that the stories we tell our kids are the ones they hold for a long time, so be careful what you let them read / watch. But finally, remember this: the next campaign you write, tell it like a story and if my theory is right, you’ll be remembered …

Can we all be entrepreneurs?

In a word, no. I don’t think entrepreneurialism can be learnt in the same way you can learn the periodic table; you can learn about business, finance, economics and all the text book stuff, but things get a bit trickier when it comes to taking on risk or having ideas. It’s a bit like art; you can learn to play things, make things, paint things even write things but you can’t learn creativity. To be brilliant at anything, you need to have more than the ability to master a few skills.

This presents two problems. The first one being that not everyone has the requisite talent to be a successful entrepreneur, so the current trend for social enterprise is never going to be a catch-all answer for a resource depleted voluntary sector, it’s simply one of many options. Let’s look at it from a sensible level: if entrepreneurialism were easily taught and we could all grasp it’s concept within a matter of hours, then we’d all be successful business people in whatever field we felt a passion and there’d never be any unemployment. I think that’s nothing more than a good analogy for the difference between idealism and realism.

If however you do possess a large dose of creativity, you’re never going to be bored but are likely to encounter the second problem: focus. I’m sure many of us changed our minds on a near daily basis when we were little people and were asked what we wanted to be when we grew up; I’m also sure there are just as many who decided they couldn’t decide definitively so decided trying everything was a good compromise. For some that all stops when they finally settle into something and accept that life will be a certain way until the end of days. For others it never stops, for some life will just never be long enough to cram all the things they want to do into it and half the battle is prioritising what order to do it in.

The latter are the kind of people who make good entrepreneurs and I’ve met a few recently who have made very simple ideas into successful enterprises. The common tale seems to be one of many ideas and not just the one. For example, someone told me that she started with a general ‘I want to do something for young people’; it took a long while to narrow that down to the core of what she does now. From what I’ve been told by those who’ve done it, the reason their ventures work is because time was taken to whittle down all the ideas into something simple and concise; it seems no-one ever comes up with that simple idea to begin with, it’s the result of a long and arduous journey.

Which is kind of reassuring. When NCVYS began its own journey into social enterprise we had what we thought was a fairly simple idea – to act as an incubator of ideas from the sector. How that might work though was pretty complex and it’s taken us some time to hone that down into a clearly structured product. The more we pondered, the more complex it got and to be honest, there have been many times when I thought I was just being plain stupid. To hear the experts say it takes time to find what’s right, is very comforting.

So I guess the moral is, if you’re one of those with a head rattling away, full of things to do, don’t try and do them all at once or you’ll get nothing done at all. If you’re not the crazy ideas person, you’re likely to be the voice of reason and I’d be surprised if every entrepreneur hasn’t needed one of those at some time or another!

Woman: an inspiration

Unfortunately I missed the slot last week and find myself this week in a bit of a quandary: do I write something ‘useful’ or simply have another rant? Before I embarked on the journey home this evening I was firmly in the former, but having spent an hour on a bus trying to mask the sound of two inconsiderate individuals jabbering on their phones ALL THE WAY (one next to me, one behind me. I was trapped! Arggh!), I arrived home in need of a massive ‘curse of the mobile phone’ tirade. Five minutes in the garden chomping on raspberries right from the cane brought the blood pressure down somewhat, so perhaps I’ll save the third instalment of gadget badgering for another day …

So, why ‘Woman: an inspiration’? I started a less painful than today’s journey earlier this week with a copy of ‘Intelligent Life’ from The Economist, which I had admittedly bought simply because of the Elvis photo on the front. I am a huge fan of Elvis and I have been ever since I was a little girl, it is no secret; particularly drawn to his pre-movie days, any 1950s photo of him works like a magnet. Perhaps one of these days I will complete the story of how it all started one 16 August 1977 (I’ve yet to get much further than that morning) but for now bear with me. Anyway, as well as the marvellous and rather moving account of how Elvis was an inspiration to Ray Connolly, there is also a pull-out on ‘inspiring women on the women who inspired them’, equally as marvellous and moving, ever so actually. All this ‘inspiration’ got me thinking about who had inspired me. Did it have to be a woman? Were there any men out there who had inspired me at some stage other than the obvious family members? Well yes, but consistency did seem to be a bit of an issue – it did seem to depend on who was flavour of the month, who’s biography I’d just read/interview I’d just seen/album I’d just heard. When I got back to thinking about the women who had inspired me, there was still a bit of a consistency issue, but they did hang around longer and there were considerably more of them. My reasoning for this is quite simple: I am a woman and therefore relate better to those like me. Easy. It only got more difficult when I thought about what exactly it was about women that inspired me.

While inspiring me to think, the Intelligent Life article also reminded me of how often I come across women from history who so deserve a bigger place in the history books and yet receive very little recognition – off the top of my head someone like Marie Bracquemond (who? I hear you cry) would be one obvious example, Mary Carpenter (no, not the mother of Karen and Richard) another. Is this simply because history has as a rule been written by men? My guess is that this is certainly a contributory factor but I also reckon, if not just from my own list of inspirational women, that women are just too busy being inspirational to spend much time shouting about it. Think about it for a while, those that are showing off are probably those that have little reason to be doing so.

All this got me thinking about something else I’d seen not that long ago: the Guardian Q&A on Women in Social Enterprise. Lots of hugely inspirational women contributed to that, not least a couple of I have personally been inspired by: Becky John of Whomadeyourpants? would be one, Lily Lapenna of MyBnk another. Yes I think we are better at showing empathy and are perhaps therefore more drawn to the business of social change but there are some sweeping statements made about how we lack a head for figures, don’t negotiate so well, etc. etc., which frankly make my blood boil.

But this isn’t about my opinions on feminism or what I would rather call equality, this is about inspiration. In my humble opinion, so few of us feel the need to beat our chests and show-off our achievements, we do just get on with it and many other things too. That I think to me is what has made so many women an inspiration, that is certainly the consistent inspiration for me: women making a positive mark on the world without making too big a deal of it. Those that really top it for me are those who manage to do that while remaining true to themselves and not giving a gnat’s earache what other people think.

So who has been the true inspiration to me then? As I said, consistency was always an issue, which in fairness says more about me and not those who have inspired me: I have been lucky enough to work with some amazing women, who have inspired me no end, particularly a certain French-Canadian lady who will never cease to blow me away; family members, particularly my sister with her wisdom and staggering ability to endure whatever life throws at her; writers, film-makers and even fictional characters. But these women all seem to inspire more admiration and awe than true and lasting inspiration; as music is my life blood, it could only ever be a musician that could provide that. But I’ll let you wonder who that might be exactly …

Blaming absent fathers … again

So, I said I wouldn’t comment on the riots – and I won’t, not directly anyway – but quelle surprise it has thrown up that single parent debate again.

Here’s a picture: your father is absent from your life for the majority of your teenage years – contact amounts to a birthday card once a year with a sentence or two in it if you’re lucky – so like many you grow up with a single parent and despite the fact that your mother works incredibly hard, there’s not much money either. Today, this would probably make you part of the rioting ‘underclass’ by Daily Mail standards and I for one am a little tired of hearing this.

Because that picture could be true now or thirty odd years ago. Things have not changed much. I know this because as a teenager in the 1980s, that’s how it was for me, I’ve been hearing it that long: my parents had a relationship that was far from ‘normal’ and my sister and I were frequently told we wouldn’t amount to much as a result. I put it purely down to the fact that we both possess some considerable resilience and mental toughness that we have, in quite different ways, proved that theory wrong. Nevertheless we both had our battles, at some time or another, trying to rebuild our self-esteem having a) been emotionally side-lined by our parents and b) had to put up with this ridiculous prejudice from Joe Bloggs.

That’s hardly fair is it? So why do we do it? Still. Why do we tar kids with the ‘worthless’ brush if they come from a single parent family? It’s hardly their fault is it? It’s an old adage and there is much truth to it: if you tell someone something often enough, they’ll believe it – that’s kind of how it is.

Sticking ourselves firmly in the Victorian era when it comes to family values isn’t going to help either. In fact quite the opposite. It all looks very easy, I’m sure, when you’re in a nice rosy relationship, you have your children and enough in the bank to keep you all safe and warm – very easy to say that if everyone lived that way then we’d all live happy privet fenced lives with zero crime and nothing but the twittering birds to bother us. Reality isn’t like that though, relationships do sometimes go a tad pear-shaped , we have to accept that and deal with it in a reasonable way; perhaps we should stop preaching the ‘for the sake of our children’ line and actually practise it.

If you enforce this ‘you’re only bringing your kids up right if you’re in a marriage’ idea you push all the crap that can happen in a relationship underground – like abuse, both physical and emotional – nasty stuff, the kind of stuff you need to get away from and certainly shouldn’t let kids witness. You only have to look to recent events in Jersey to see an example of what happens if you try and ‘carry on regardless’.

Here is an obvious but often over-looked fact: when you’re growing up, you have very little control over what happens to you. People do stuff anyway, parents in particular, but because you’re a child/young person, you’re the one that ends up carrying the effects of that chaos.

I think as a society we have to move on and accept marriage doesn’t always work and accept that kids born into a relationship that breaks down are not hopeless cases. As a society we have to get off this blame the single parents trip and take collective responsibility.

I used to work with a director in Denmark: he had been married 3 times and had 5 children, all of whom were pretty cool kids; I believe the fact that Dad was able to be Dad to all of them probably contributed to that. The crucial difference for these kids was that despite their parents ending their own relationship, the relationship between parents and children continued, more to the point was allowed to continue, with minimal disruption to their lives. What happens in Denmark is that little rules are put in place, e.g. you can’t move more than so many miles away from your children, or move your children so many miles away from their father/mother. The children’s school is used as a base point and as a parent, whether you’re with the other parent or not, you can’t live more than a half hour, for example, from that base point – the children therefore, always have access to their parents. Wow, what a simple concept. Furthermore, people in Denmark and in fact the other Nordic countries, appear to be a lot more ‘real’ when it comes to ‘values’ and the ‘family’; it’s not unusual to be married more than once, for children to be a part of more than one family. The difference is simply that they’re just all a bit more ‘21st century’ about it, i.e. they have accepted marriage doesn’t always work, but that this doesn’t mean the notion of ‘family’ is broken for the kids. Because here’s another obvious but often over-looked fact: when you have kids, that’s your family, or at least one of them, for life – there is no getting away from it.

It is very hard to break the link between parents and their children, whatever either party do. We need to stop blaming kids for the actions of their parents because they will take that on board and as a result, more harm is done than good; if you’re looked down on before you’ve even had a chance to rise, then what help is that? The ‘family unit’ comes in all shapes and sizes, we need to get over the out-of-date notion that that is 2.4 kids, Mum, Dad and Fluff the cat in a box, because if we don’t, then we alienate a very large proportion of our younger generations …

A new England?

When I wrote my last piece, I had no idea that within a couple of days of its publication the world would seemingly explode in a ball of fire over London town, north and south. Rarely do I feel the need to use the MF-word, in fact even less frequently than the C-word, but as I saw homes and livelihoods reduced to cinders in a matter of hours, I was hard-pushed to find the expletives strong enough. But no, I’m not going to offer yet another commentary on the riots, as I don’t have anything original to add. Among the many things that this wave of violence highlighted though, is how long this anger has clearly been festering. This isn’t just about a lack of prospects brought about by a new government intent on saving pennies in a large number of questionable ways, more than anything this is about attitudes and not just those of the younger generation, but those of my own too.

Over the last few days, I have heard some comments from those of us old enough to remember Billy Bragg’s early work and who are still picking away at the scabs Thatcher left us with suggesting the greed expressed by the champagne red braces brigade of the eighties now seems tame in comparison. I disagree. We’re just seeing it from a different angle now. While the stock brokers back then salivated in a mad-grabbing feeding frenzy at the flash cars and dockland apartments available to them, the rest of us just looked on dumbfounded while the odd musician wrote a song about it and Harry Enfield parodied it. A couple of decades later, that same brigade has learnt to loot our grandparents’ savings, fiddle expenses and bribe the authorities while we quietly watched; as a result, our children (and yes a considerable number of oldies too) hit back in an unbelievably desperate and angry fashion. While I can’t condone it, I find it hard not to understand where this has come from.

I have not been surprised by the political reaction. Nor do I disagree entirely, however hard it is for me to swallow, with the notion that we have a problem with values. I would certainly argue though, and rather strongly, that society as a whole has some serious questions to ask itself and not just those ‘have-nots’. I therefore ask myself just how we’re going to be able to address these values that appear to have shifted since Maggie ruled over us. With funding for youth work now much more targeted (e.g. on getting NEETs to EETs, getting young offenders out of the systems, young carers cared for etc.) and based on hard results, just how do we show that not only are soft outcomes important for young people but worth investing hard cash in too?

It’s a tricky question, but one we (NCVYS) are looking to answer over the next few months with our Catalyst partners the Young Foundation. Before the calendar year is out, we hope to have established a social finance retailer that can pilot and then promote a youth sector specific social investment approach based on evidence of impact. To do that properly, we’re currently in the process of putting an outcomes framework together, not just by looking at the ‘harder’ indicators, like crime and employment, but at the ‘softer’ indicators, like confidence, resilience etc. that if achieved will help to ensure positive rather than negative outcomes for young people. This will not only help organisations providing services to young people to demonstrate the value of what they do, it will enable investors and commissioners alike to understand that value. Only then can we start thinking about a more long-term change in attitudes, rather than the knee-jerk sticky plaster approach we’re seeing now.

By the way, if you too are tempted on occasion to use the MF-word, a more family friendly version I have learnt this week is ‘Melon Farmer’ – feel free to use as frequently as you may be inclined!

It’s the end of the world as we know it

As the global markets plunge while Europe and her US buddies are engulfed in a debt crisis, I find myself discussing with my friends what we should be (panic)-buying over the next few days and wondering whether I should have perhaps been a bit more savage with my garden snail problem, given my self-cultivated tomatoes and beetroot may be all I have left to eat this summer – oh and some raspberries, if the robins don’t get them first. Maybe I should just move to Brazil, I hear it’s quite nice there.

Seriously though, is this where we’ve got to? Our little bit shaky coalition skulks into the summer recess as the public wonder just how tightly Murdoch was squeezing not just government balls for the last however many decades but those of the trusted police too. Norway, Norway? Norway suffers the most appalling assault on its wonderful young people and what happens here? The debate around capital punishment is suddenly unleashed upon us out of the merry blue.

What? What the front door is going on? Has the heat gone to our heads? Hasn’t this everyone-for-themselves-and-if-they-don’t-like-hang-them attitude gone a just bit too far now?

I think back a couple of years to when this all started and my own motives for changing sector and I do find myself humming an old REM tune, the title of which heads this. As we went into this recession, many a plaudit reckoned this would be over in a couple of years, whoever believed that was a fool. Me, I had a little faith in humankind and thought maybe this would shake people up a bit, get them thinking about what is really important, money can’t buy you love and all that. Maybe I was the fool, thinking everyone was going through the ‘is this it’ mid-life crisis that I was.

Well actually no, not everyone. As a child I had this book, it was simply called ‘Dinosaurs’ and sadly I have no idea who it was by but it was a story (as opposed to a geeky child guide to our Jurassic friends) and I loved it. It went a little bit like this: once upon a time the world was a beautiful place, full of green trees, flowers, fields and many a happy dinosaur. But then man came and tarmaced it all over, building factories and making lots of smelly pollution and basically not giving a gnats fart about anyone but themselves. In fact it got so smelly the dinosaurs woke up angry, just like man was angry (because that’s what concrete does). The dinosaurs were so angry they trudged across the world, stamping on all the roads and factories so that the world looked like a broken place – way too broken for man to fix. Man was really angry and tried to hunt the dinosaurs but they were bigger and slowly but surely all the trees and flowers grew back, growing so strong they took over all the broken tarmac and ugly concrete so that they were no more. The dinosaurs said to man: “look how much prettier it is now, breath that clean air” and man was considerably more chilled and said: “you know what, I kind of like this” … and so they lived happily ever after in green not grey.

Thinking about it, it was quite trippy and a bit of a hippy ideal but this was the seventies. Nevertheless, I have often wished the dinosaurs would come back. I’m beginning to think they might have to.

And maybe they are, just in non-dinosaur form. While I was busy looking at those ‘make your money work for you’ adverts and asking, ‘hmmm define ‘work’’ and pontificating the merits of this and that savings fund, someone put his money on the table and said ‘do good’. More of that please. The CAF Social Impact Fund is a really clever way to tempt investors into charitable giving – it’s risky but in this day and age, what isn’t. If I had a few thousand to spare I would rather put it here than plonk it in a high street bank. There’s room for similar models for smaller investments I’m sure and when you really think about it, this should be the only way to make your money work. If you can put your money into a fund and make it work not just for you but for a shed load of good causes, how can you even remotely consider something else? In the meantime, more like Dr Chandaria are sorely needed.

This is the reality of today, we might not feel we’re all responsible for this mess but we have to stop complaining and do something about it, because only we can change this sorry state. And that does go for everyone – if you don’t have the cash, well just pull your finger out instead. As I typed this last night, someone else was thinking the same thing and published this ‘Big Reality’article this morning. It’s worth a read and it’s worth listening to. Stop waiting for the dinosaurs to wake up, wakey wakey yourselves!